Promoting pain relief and preventing the abuse of pain medications can be difficult for health professionals to balance. Patients who use drugs of abuse are more likely to abuse pain medications and more likely to divert medication either for financial gain or to fund an addition to legal or illegal drugs. Patients who use drugs of abuse are also at higher risk of combining such use with the legal drugs that are prescribed to them, which puts them at risk for overdoses and accidents. Patients who take legally prescribed controlled medications may also be knowingly or unknowingly combining prescriptions from multiple prescribers, which can put them at risk for overdoses and accidents. The ingestion of multiple opioid/opiates can result in respiratory depression and/or fatal respiratory failure. Moreover, death rates from prescription opioid/opiate use are increasing, and the abuse of prescription opioid/opiate use is also increasing.
However, the interpretation of pain management opioid/opiate toxicology test data is complex. Physicians may lack the time and/or expertise to interpret pain management opioid/opiate toxicology data. In addition, opioid/opiate drug metabolism is complex, and some opioid/opiate drug metabolites are also available as prescription drugs, which makes the source of the opioid/opiate drug difficult to determine.